TAMPER: Gestural Interface for Cinematic Design

January 24 – April 20, 2008

TAMPER: Gestural Interface for Cinematic Design is a participatory work that fuses cutting-edge interface technology with the practice of film production. The result is an off-kilter editing room in which the museum visitor becomes cinema collage artist, literally using her or his hands to grab and recompose elements from different movies: characters here, props there, architecture from one, an entire scene from another. Each emerging paste-up flows into TAMPER’s history stream, which may be browsed subsequently or used as a source of material for further collage. The experience is a form of active viewing – by bending film back to bite its own tail.

Former MIT Media Lab researcher and computer scientist John Underkoffler developed the world’s first fully realized gestural interface - called “g-speak” - allowing gestural control to replace the mouse and keyboard. This third exhibition in the PROJECT LAB series at the UAM focuses on the ways that “g-speak’s” visually immersive environment and direct manipulation techniques enable a new kind of dialogue between human and machine.